Powershares Commodity ETFs: Gold, Oil

Find Powershares Commodity ETFs for your investment. There are 8 commodity exchange traded funds below including oil, gold, agriculture fund, etc.

Investing in Commodity ETFs

Investing in commodities has become popular and easier as various commodity investment funds being introduced. There are variety of commodity funds such as mutual funds, exchange traded funds, or closed end funds. This article will look into recent ads by Invesco Powershares about commodity ETF funds. You may be able to invest in them for asset allocation or diversification.

Whether the commodity is oil, gold, silver, corn or soyabeans; you can invest in any commodity through exchange trade funds. You can find 8 different commodity ETFs offered by Invesco Powershares. Find the fund review below.

The investment ad is as follows:

PowerShares

Deutsche Asset & Wealth Management 

PowerShares DB – Commodity ETFs

• DBC – Commodity Index Tracking Fund
• DBO – Oil Fund
• DBA – Agriculture Fund
• DGL – Gold Fund
• DBS – Silver Fund
• DBP – Precious Metals Fund
• DBB – Base Metals Fund
• DBE – Energy Fund

To download a copy of the prospectus, visit http://pwr.sh/DBCp | http://pwr.sh/DBAp | http://pwr.sh/CMp 

The funds are not mutual funds or any other type of Investment Company within the meaning of the Investment Company Act of 1940 and are not subject to its regulation.
DB Commodity Services LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Deutsche Bank AG, is the managing owner of the funds. Certain marketing services may be provided to the funds by Invesco Distributors, Inc. or its affiliate, Invesco PowerShares Capital Management LLC (together, “Invesco”). Invesco will be compensated by Deutsche Bank or its affiliates. ALPS Distributors, Inc. is the distributor of the funds. Invesco, Deutsche Bank or ALPS Distributors, Inc. are not affiliated. 

Commodity futures contracts generally are volatile and are not suitable for all investors.
An investor may lose all or substantially all of an investment in the funds.

PowerShares Commodity ETFs Review

There are eight funds described in this article of the Powershares Commodity ETF. The first commodity fund is DBC – PowerShares DB Commodity Index Tracking. It is ranked with 3-stars rating by Morningstar analysts. The total net assets are $6.07 billion. The annual expense ratio is 0.85%. The fund’s CUSIP is 73935S105. Since the inception in 2006, it has returned 2.70%. The fund has -7.99% of YTD return. The 1-year annualized return is -8.58% and 3.55% of 5-year annualized return.

The next fund is an oil commodity ETF. PowerShares DB Oil Fund has YTD return of 4.20%. It has the highest return in 2009 with 42.85% and the lowest in -43.99% in 2008. The fund is currently traded at discount -0.04% from its NAV. It also has $324.87 million of total net assets. It uses S&P GSCI Crude Oil Index as its benchmark.

PowerShares DB Agriculture Fund

The investment objective of DB Agriculture Fund is to track the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index – Optimum Yield Agriculture Excess Return. It has $1.37 billion total net assets. It also has annual expense ratio from 0.85%. Its current NAV is $24.74. The fund is on the 34th rank among its peers. It was on the 1st rank in 2008.

If you want to invest in gold commodity ETF, you should consider PowerShares DB Gold Fund. Since the inception in 2007, this Gold ETF Fund has always returned positively. The highest was in 2010 with 27.89%. The fund has annual expense ratio of 0.75%. It uses S&P 500 Index and Barclays U.S. Treasury 20+ Index as the benchmarks. The CUSIP is 73936B606.

The next fund on the list is PowerShares DB Silver Fund (DBS). It was incepted in January 2007. This ETF fund is currently traded at 0.09% discount from its NAV.  It has annual expense ratio of 0.75%. The YTD return is -36.60%. The 5-year annualized return is 13.79%.

PowerShares DB Precious Metals Fund seeks to track the price and yield performance, before fees and expenses, of the Deutsche Bank Liquid Commodity Index – Optimum Yield Precious Metals Excess Return. Since the inception in 2007, the fund returned negatively only in 2008 with -2.89%. The best 1-year total return was in 2010 with 37.56%. The YTD return is -29.02%.

PowerShares DB Base Metals Fund is the next fund on this ETF list. The total net assets of DBB fund are $249.91 million. It also has 0.75% annual expense ratio. The fund is currently traded at premium 0.07%. It is on the 53rd rank among its peers.

The last ETF fund is PowerShares DB Energy Fund (DBE). The fund’s CUSIP is 73936B101. Its annual expense ratio is 0.78%. The benchmark is S&P GSCI Energy Index. The top index weights are Brent Crude, Heating Oil, Light Crude and RBOB Gasoline. Each of them has 22.50% base weights. The YTD return is 2.68%. It has 5-year annualized return of 5.27%.

Last Word

• All these ETF funds are great choices for alternative investing. Invest only 5-10% of total assets in one or two of these funds.
• Some funds are low in assets. They also may have low volume trading among them. Use limit order for investing in these exchange trade funds.
• These commodity ETFs may be volatile, you might need to know the risks before investing.